Nope, it’s not an April Fools joke. It has been more than forty years since Canada officially went Metric. April 1st, 1975, to be exact. It was on this day that Bill Lawrence presented the first metric version of our weather forecast on the 6 o’clock news. Bill was a news anchor and weatherman and well known as the host of CHCH’s “Tiny Talent Time”.
On this day millimeters, centimeters, kilometers per hour replaced inches, feet and miles. For a while, both formats were used in print media and on the air. Metric was first legalized in Canada as a system of measurement by John A. McDonald in 1871 but it was not well received and many refused to make the switch. In 1975, the Liberal government made it mandatory.
